Portside

Several weeks ago, the Prospect ran a feature article of mine pointing out that Trump’s war on DEI was a cover for simple racism. It was a thinly disguised excuse to assume that any Black official must have gotten the job because of racial preferences, and thus to discriminate explicitly against Blacks.

I actually understated Trump’s evil and cynicism. Last week, Trump abruptly fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, a Black librarian of national distinction. Hayden’s term appointment had another year to run, making the dismissal illegal as well.

Hayden previously served as head of the public library systems of Chicago and Baltimore, and as president of the American Library Association. When she was appointed in 2016 by President Obama, more than 140 library, publishing, educational, and academic organizations signed a letter of support. The Senate confirmed her 74 to 18, with most Republicans voting to confirm.

The post is not a partisan position. Nobody in the Republican-led Congress had sought Hayden’s dismissal. It was pure Trump.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a stunning display of either ignorance or pure BS, told reporters Friday that Hayden had been “putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” The Library of Congress does not lend books to children, or indeed to adults.

Here’s the irony. Trump has been on a rampage of DEI for unqualified white people. Does it get more unqualified than RFK Jr., or Pete Hegseth?

By comparison, the Black appointees whom Trump has fired, as alleged DEI hires, are more than eminently qualified. You could imagine a Saturday Night Live sketch on Trump DEI for incompetent whites.

Occasionally, there are Black folks of dubious qualifications who got their positions due to racial preferences—but that isn’t just, or even mainly, for Democrats. Clarence Thomas would lead such a list, and Herschel Walker would end it. The Republican right gives them a pass.

Trump has also disingenuously posed as a champion of Jews, the better to assault liberal institutions such as universities and to divert civil rights enforcement away from Blacks, women, sexual minorities, and others who have suffered more vicious discrimination, and to pressure Jews to be 100 percent defenders of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This unholy alliance will come back to haunt Jews.

Just to rub it in, Trump, the relentless scourge of the world’s refugees, has made an exception for one country, actually for one ethnic group in one country. That would be Afrikaners, a subsection of the white minority in South Africa.

In February, Trump signed an executive order directing his government to slash aid to the South African government, and to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” So far, the U.S. has granted special refugee status to 49 such Afrikaners, who arrived by charter flight in Washington Monday afternoon and were welcomed by senior government officials, not ICE agents. Trump created a special fast track for them.

The background for the alleged discrimination against these white South Africans is, of course, the white colonization of South Africa, the theft of tribal lands, and the sordid history of apartheid. Three decades after apartheid ended, the multiracial South African government has barely begun a modest program of land reform. After several false starts since 1994, the share of private farmland owned by white South Africans (who make up about 7 percent of the population) has fallen by about a fifth, though that still leaves them with about 78 percent of the total. Yet even these efforts have been characterized as murderous. “It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Trump said at a recent press conference. “Farmers are being killed.”

All this is largely beside the point. Just as in the U.S., the vast majority of Afrikaners are not farmers, and a small handful of huge farms account for most of the sector. Most white South Africans even don’t want to leave the place that is, according to the post-apartheid settlement, their rightful homeland too. In March, the U.S. Embassy in South Africa claimed it received a list of 67,000 white South Africans interested in emigration, against a total population of about 4.5 million. Indeed, conservative Afrikaner groups told The Guardian they were concerned about aid being cut off and Trump’s tariffs harming their agricultural exports. In the end, Trump’s minions had to scramble to recruit 49 alleged refugees.

Looking around the world, this is evidently the only worthy case for refugees that Trump can find. The symbolism is deliberate and appalling.

On his first day in office, Trump suspended the U.S. refugee settlement program, stranding more than 100,000 people previously approved for resettlement who had fled war and persecution in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. Most such refugees are nonwhite, from what Trump has delicately described as shithole countries.

There is nothing dog-whistle about Trump’s racism. It is a shameless bugle call.

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Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.